Invisibili Cose

Nightly routine with the Black-Gaunt family.

Today’s practice/ quick sketch

1. Canon I outright reject

2. A canon or headcanon hill I will die on

3. Obscure headcanon

4. Favorite line

5. Best personality trait

6. Worst personality trait

7. Age/height/weight headcanon

8. Unpopular opinion about them

9. Scene that first made me love (or hate) the character

10. Best moment on screen (or in the book)

11. Faceclaim for the role

12. Crack headcanon

13. Dumbest thing they’ve ever done

14. Most heroic moment

15. Worst thing they’ve ever done

16. Deepest darkest secret they won’t even admit to themselves

17. Quotes, songs, poems, etc. that I associate with them

18. What they’d go to see a therapist about

19. Vices/bad habits

20. Scars

21. Drink of choice (not just alcoholic)

22. Best physical feature

23. If they were a scented candle, what would they smell like?

24. Most annoying habit

25. 3 things they’d want to take with them if they were dropped off in the middle of nowhere

26. What they would do if stuck in an elevator with [insert character of your choice from the same fandom]

27. Their guilty pleasure

28. How they feel about [insert character of your choice from the same fandom]

29. Eating habits

30. Sleeping habits

31. If the had a tumblr what would it look like?

32. Something guaranteed to make them smile/laugh

33. Something guaranteed to make them cry

34. How they react when they are feeling X emotion (sad, angry, excited, scared, etc.—can specify as many as you like)

35. Their idea of a perfect day

36. Their favorite season

37. What they really think about themselves

38. Favorite holiday

39. Favorite game

40. Favorite book

41. If they could have lunch with anyone in the world (living or dead, from any fictional universe or the real world), who would it be?

42. 3 comfort items

43. 3 favorite foods and 3 they despise

44. Their happiest memory

45. Their favorite celebrity

46. The person they most admire

47. Their dream job

48. Scariest moment of their life

49. Favorite toy as a child

work has been terrible, i crave angst 😈

then you shall have it, anon.

[character ask game here]

16. what is their deepest darkest secret, which they won’t even admit to themselves?

that he’s profoundly, profoundly lonely.

in half-blood prince, dumbledore presents voldemort’s friendlessness as - in essence - an active choice. he tells us that voldemort loathed the other children in his orphanage, that he saw his ‘devoted’ schoolfriends as mere tools for his wrongdoing, and that he has no interest in his death eaters beyond their service to his aims.

this, i’m afraid to say, is classic dumbledore-chatting-shit-on-the-basis-of-his-own-self-loathing. dumbledore may have virtually no true friends by choice, but voldemort would clearly love some. the issue, as always, is that he’s constrained by his cataclysmic childhood trauma.

it’s clear that - much like harry! whose trauma is treated very differently by the narrative! - voldemort has enormous trust issues, caused by the fact that he grew up without any safe adult role models. this will have had a huge impact on his ability to make friends, since he undoubtedly has no understanding of affection which is honest, unconditional, or reciprocal - much like harry! who takes seven books to get it through his head that ron and hermione aren’t lying when they say they’re with him no matter what!

but - unlike harry, whose capacity for forgiveness is astonishing - voldemort’s trust issues evidently also come with a whole tranche of resentment. his profound dislike of liars and hypocrites - no matter how ironic this might be - must arise from this childhood feeling that he can’t actually trust anyone.

but he would obviously like to. the canonical voldemort is clearly desperate to be understood - he needs virtually no prompting to start spilling his deepest secrets to harry on more than one occasion, the same is true of his first meeting with dumbledore - and, crucially, to be understood as he is. dumbledore’s poor handling of how excited he is to discover he’s magical [which i’ve written about in more detail here] upsets him and sends him back behind the mask of the cold and confident tom riddle he’s clearly been working on since he was very young; his pleasure at discovering - through ginny - that harry is also an orphaned parselmouth is so significant that he gives up on his plan to murder as many muggleborns as possible and focuses exclusively on meeting his new bff; his need to make harry understand that his father - as he sees it - abandoned him and he’s furious about it occupies a sizeable portion of their interactions in chamber of secrets and goblet of fire.

but he can’t get there. he can’t be vulnerable enough to admit to this; he hasn’t been paid enough attention in his life to know how to have a relationship where he doesn’t dominate; he would rather be feared than loved, because fear is an emotion he can control.

and it backfires on him. he hints - although he couches it in the camp performance of his graveyard speech - in goblet of fire at just how devastated he was to end up in a tree in albania in 1981 and have nobody (except the love of his life - not that he’s ever told her that - bellatrix) try to come and find him. his obviously cooled relationship with the death eaters who pretended not to have supported him during his exile from order of the phoenix onwards masks the pain he feels at their abandonment of him and all the long-buried feelings that brings up about the other people in his life (especially his mother) who, in his view, have abandoned him too. it doesn’t occur to him that this is his own fault - making people feel no emotion for you other than terror isn’t a great way to get them to be your ride-or-die - because he thinks it’s the way of the world; what good are friends? he doesn’t have any and he has no need of them anyway. 

or so he tells himself. right up until the moment he lands with a splat on the floor of the orphanage - having been killed by harry seconds earlier - and discovers that nobody has come to meet him.

33. what's something guaranteed to make them cry?

lord voldemort never cries, as we know (and if there’s a more devastating example of the casual cruelty of the institutionalisation of children than dumbledore and mrs cole treating the fact that, as a baby, tom riddle had learned that crying was futile as nothing more than a bit of odd gossip, i’ve never seen it).

but learning his mother’s real name - something which all the evidence of canon is that he doesn’t know - and getting to see her face would probably do it. maybe dumbledore could have tightened up and let him have a little look at bob ogden’s trip to little hangleton.

50. what's a memory they’ve blocked out?

literally fucking everything about his childhood.

I know probably no one cares about this, but since I was very young, I’ve always had this curiosity about the looks of the Dark Lord during the First Wizarding War. Especially, I was intrigued by his depiction in the Half Blood Prince when, already graduated from Hogwarts, he started working at Borgin and Burkes. It is written that he speaks with a soft voice, that he wears his hair longer than it had been at Hogwarts, that he is thin with hollowed cheeks and – shockingly – that he doesn’t wear wizard’s robes but a black suit.

This is all very interesting to me, since I have this weird obsession of looking for cues about his personality, even in these scarce descriptions about his appearance and of course I get mad because of how difficult it is. The fact that he wears his hair long could be both a sign of vanity or a way of communicating his lack of interest about his looks – leading to him being a handsome man anyways.  Of course, we know that he does not crave for being considered beautiful, since a few lines ahead we come to know that he altered his features forever, during his permanence in Albania:  

His features were not those Harry had seen emerge from the great stone cauldron almost two years ago: They were not as snake-like, the eyes were not yet scarlet, the face not yet masklike, and yet he was no longer handsome Tom Riddle. It was as though his features had been burned and blurred; they were waxy and oddly distorted, and the whites of the eyes now had a permanently bloody look, though the pupils were not yet the slits that Harry knew they would become. He was wearing a long black cloak, and his face was as pale as the snow glistening on his shoulders.

-      Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Chapter 20.

Can’t blame a young emo girl like me for falling in love with this man 10 years ago. Now, of course, my love remains unchanged, and I still have hard feelings for not have seen young Lord Voldemrot on the big screen, when I was a teenager (will the up coming series remedy to this? We don’t know).

So, my mind has wandered for a long time, searching for someone – made of blood and bones – that could resemble the description of First Wizarding War Voldemort that we are left with.

Conscious of the fact that no one is going to share my opinion, I think I’ve found an original solution to the problem and I’m going to stick with this till death.

In fact, while my literary heart is reserved for Lord Voldemort, my musical taste brought me to The Think White Duke, David Bowie. I know, it sounds crazy, but I believe that this amazing – and very missed – genius shares a lot of physical traits with young Lord Voldemort, during this mysterious years in the books.

So, I want to share with you this interview, hoping deep down that you’ll find the same similarities that I found some time ago and that never cease to warm my heart.

First, his voice: he speaks softly but fast – and with a wonderful British accent that, of course, he shares with Londoner Tom Riddle. He is polite but also elusive. He keeps all the attention on him and his words in the exact same way I imagine young Voldemort would do.

Second, his appearance: he is thin, almost skeletal and has something feminine in him that I personally find devastatingly attractive. He has the hollow cheeks and the thin lips with a crooked smile that – my personal point of view here – he could share with our young Lord Voldemort. He has long thin hands with slim fingers.

Now, imagine him with black hair – with the same haircut – and reddened eyes and I think we have it.

Also, I wanted to post here this picture, because I’m confident that this is the best representation we’ll ever have of what the Dark Lord should’ve looked like in the movies (I know I’m a minority here on this topic, but I absolutely dislike how Ralph Fiennes managed to act him in the movies, so disappointing). 

Let me know what you think about this and please be kind with your words, since of course, this is a topic I care a lot about.

Yours,

You are very observant! Really it’s very interesting that young Voldemort was dressed in a suit. Strange even.

I’ve liked David Bowie’s interview, although I’ve always imagined that Tom Riddle was more masculine, patient and composed.

I want to shake your hand because I don’t like Ralph Fiennes’s performance too. It seems to me that it was his fault as well as the director’s. And he didn’t suit for the role completely, imho.

Voldemort in his youth looks like Mat Gordon in my head (with some amendments). And I like this art very much. This is nearly how I pictured Voldemort just before and after his Return.

I think Mads Mikkelsen would make a great Voldemort because he has the vibes.

I completely agree that, expecially during his youth and the First War, Lord Voldemort was quite calm and collected, although unpredictable. After his rebirth, I think he got way more impulsive, and of course I completely understand him, after what he’s been through, mentally and physically ^^. I also asume that his looks were more aligned with what we consider to be "masculine", during his Hogwarts years. Nevertheless, I recently read an essay about how his description detaches from most of the traditional masculinity traits, and why, and I’ve been so fascinated about this topic since then that it’s hard for me not to see that now. I like the idea of him being so much more than a man that the differences between genders tend to vanish and I hope to write about it in the future. I think it's also linked to the idea of him being above dualities in general: good and evil, dead and alive, male and female are human-created ideologies but Magic itself does not stand under this kind of mechanism in his vision, for what I’ve understood of his character in the books. 

For this reason, I don’t know if I can picture mr. Mikkelsen in the role of our dear Dark Lord, who is also very thin and elongated. I’ve always imagine his face less squared. I hope wholeheartedly that they’ll cast Benedict Cumberbatch for the role in the upcoming series, mostly for his acting skills, his accent and the fact that he can be really... reptilian, I'd say... although I’ve very low expectations about this whole matter.